Overtime

I shared a fairy tale with 80 freshmen in Utopia. Once upon a time in the long now there was a continent, a landmass floating on water. White barbarians labeled it Asia on dusty maps. Deep inside Asia were vast lands, rivers and mountains.

Overtime, a historical bandit with a reputation for laughter, magic, fear, superstition, and an insatiable appetite for diverse languages, customs and cultures lived in jungles and forests. Others preferred living in remote mountains.

Jingle, jangle, jungle. Using natural materials they created musical instruments, simple weapons, homes, fish traps, snares and tools like looms. The women had babies, wove cloth and prepared food. Men fished, planted crops, domesticated animals. Children in extended families learned life lessons.

One day a boat filled with white men sailed down the heart of darkness to a village deep in the jungle. They wore shiny clothing, spoke a language the people didn't understand and carried weapons that made a lot of noise and scared the people. They pretended to be friendly by offering gifts. The leader of the village welcomed them. They had a party.

Life is a party. Too soon it's yesterday.

Mandalay, Burma

Every day more white people came down the river on boats named Destiny. They were on a quest for gold and slaves. Owning, using and discarding slaves had proven to be an essential part of their historical evolution on other continents. Their mantra was cheap people, cheap labor, cheap raw materials, cheap goods, cheap markets and much Profit.

We are civilized and you are savages, said the white men. We have religion. It is called Greed & Wealth. We are on a mission from the great chief. We control fire. We control time. We control people. We control nature. We have machines. We take what we want.

The village gave them hospitality and shelter and friendship. The white men were greedy. They took control of the village, the people and the jungle.

Every day the white men marched their slaves deep into the jungle singing, we control nature. We shall overcome. They spread diseases. They planted fear. They planted envy and jealousy. They manipulated villages against villages. They divided and conquered, one against the other. History taught them well. They harvested wealth in the form of people, precious stones, rubber and every useful raw material. They were never satisfied. Their appetite grew and grew.

One night a village shaman said, to survive we travel to new jungles. Our dream is to be a free person in a free country.

The 80 applauded. That’ll be the day. Tell us another fairy tale.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Mandalay

Pay the price

I never take yes for an answer.

What I do today is important because I am paying a day of my life for it. What I accomplish must be worthwhile because the price is high.

*

Every day in Utopia is Clean Your Ears Day, said Leo. It’s a big deal considering ears are small and portable. They go everywhere you go.

The first time my ears were deep cleaned was in Chengdu. A woman worked at the open-air opera theatre decorated with gigantic red and black demon masks.

I watched her doing men sitting in bamboo chairs. Her tools and instruments were disinfected. Scaling, probing, curling out the wax. Cotton swabs.

It’s a great feeling. BUZZ. Today was the perfect opportunity to clean out the old ears. Bliss baby. Say what?

Aural chambers sing. The ear cleaning procedure removed debris and clutter as analyzed by auditory forensic experts:

1.         cycle of cycles including life cycles

2.         incessant trajectory of love and passion orators

3.         hummingbird whispers

4.         laughter

5.         crying, whining, screaming children - many over 25

6.         heartbroken lovers

7.         distraught wandering tourists

8.         dancing fools. you are a fool whether you dance or not, so you may as well dance

Vientiane, Laos

8a.       crazies I love, fools are sheep

9.         distracted kind idiots yelling at high decibel levels

10.       minstrels

11.       singers, dancers, hustlers

12.       motorcycle cowboys, hookers, massage parlor slaves, rice slaves, rich/poor wage slaves

13.       laughing sheep (volunteered slavery)

14.       lonely philistine Filipino maids in exile from martial law and massacres hanging out in Saigon parks bothering travelers, talking about the weather, breaking their lonely ice lives discussing the value of shoes and jewelry on sale at discount stores

15.       bored frustrated wives, husbands, lovers and mistresses with tresses in distress

16.       unemployed vagrants, misfits, derelicts, amputees, orphans, storytellers

17.       fortune tellers, employed or not, and prototype aliens filled with monetary motivations

18.       nutritional experts and particle collider scientists

19.       visions of a supreme creator laughing at everyone

20.       people who say, I don’t have a listening problem, I have a hearing problem

21.       your choice for $2.77 plus tax

Open your ears, open your Mind-At-Large, said Leo. Taking a risk is not fatal.

Book of Amnesia, V2

Yangon, Burma

Vientiane Kid

Life Lesson #5

What is life, said Lucky.

I’m a big seven as in seven, said an omniscient reliable Lao narrator. Your life is not a test or a dress rehearsal. If it is an actual life your invisible friends protect you from desire, anger, ignorance and fear with courage.

My dad’s not very smart. It’s his DNA, a string theory of letters. Genetics. Gee. Net. Icks. 

Let me give you a kind-hearted example of his stupidity. It’s the rainy season. Slashing squalling delicious rain. Soft, cool, soothing. Like tears. Cry me a river.

It’s pouring like honey. What’s dear old dad do? He washes his silver passenger van in a downpour. Smart eh? Yeah, he’s trying to impress a dry writer polishing words by using his intelligent hose running wealthy water over rain. Cleaning. He gets a free shower.

He ignores me. I am a tool.

Grandmother sits on our austere 1924 colonial dark-brown balcony folding banana leaves for a ceremony. Every morning at dawn she walks to the muddy road near the Mekong offering Buddhist monks handfuls of rice. She burns incense at the family altar. She nurtures her shrinking garden after her son decided to plant a cement parking lot. What a clever little man.

My grandfather stares at rain, forming lakes.

Daddy’s very busy. He disappears for hours drinking beer with friends. Playing around with a secret squeeze in dark places. She’s starving for cash. A poor girl from a poor family in a poor country needs to make a living poor thing.

My mom’s also smart. What’s the difference between smart and clever? Maybe that’s the answer to your life quest-ion.

Survival with a capital S.

After the rain when it's dry and the smallest full moon of the year rises above the Mekong before a river festival filled with floating orange flowers and burning candles she incinerates plastic garbage. Yeah. Yeah. Burn baby burn. Light my fire.

It's a sweet smell let me tell you. Like when Duvall in Apocalypse Now said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. That smell. What's the word? Acrid. 

When she’s not burning plastic trash she sweeps. Broom music. Stone cold. She cooks. She pretends to be busy. She’s a baby delivery service. What’s another mouth? She manages home, kids and cash. I’m worth $3,500 on the stolen kid market in China. My older sister would’ve been aborted. Bad luck for her.

Mom ignores me. I am a tool.

She’s super busy doing her gentle mother routine. Later, she squawks. She's a soft kind later.

Parents and teachers and millions of lazy humans here love to pretend to be busy. I guess it gives their short life value.

Milling around is an art form with style. Art transforms life.

Lao are soft and kind. We have a good heart. We are not as mercenary as the Vietnamese. We drift through your sensation, perception and consciousness with the grace of a cosmic Lepidoptera in a gentle breeze.

The trick is to tolerate with kindness and Patience, your great teacher, the empty-eyed star gazing starers and hustlers. Bored after five minutes they lose interest and leave you alone. Zap like a zigzag lightning bolt. Gone.

Vietnamese plant rice.

Cambodians watch it grow.

Laotians hear it grow.

Nature’s a great teacher. We are nature’s tools.

For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity. This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like a missing leg after discovering a landmine in paradise. 

Limited opportunities, unregulated population growth, substandard education, no medicine, no hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around.

It kills time alleviating boredom a dreaded lethargic tedious disease.

Boredom is fear’s patience.

Milling around kills the human spirit. No initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to get a life and accept personal responsibility for choices and consequences.

Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam are alive with unexploded ordinance, amputees, superstition and ghosts.

Existence is one long perpetual distraction. Say what?

You may as well do what you love because you're going to spend most of your life doing it. We breed, work, get slaughtered and mill around. We are told to blend in to survive. My mom taught me this hard cruel life lesson. She reminds me every time I open my mouth to express an original free thinking idea. That’s what parents and teachers teach us by example and they have extensive Life Experience - another amazing teacher.

If you ask why they cut out your tongue.

I’m too young to know much. I know what I don’t know. Anyway, I need to finish my school paper on developing moral character with social intelligence, courage, self-control, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.

How do you develop self-control and courage?

By failing. Fail better. There are two kinds of character.

What are they?

Moral character is fairness, generosity and integrity.

Performance character is effort, diligence and perseverance.

Kids need challenges to grow. Like hardships and deprivation. Life is trial and error and taking risks. Daring is not fatal.

Thanks for life lesson #5. You are the future of Laos.

You’re welcome. I have my junior philosopher’s badge.

Weaving A Life, V1

Practice

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden. It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ... Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Practice allows you to wake up.

Mandalay

*

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a calm velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.   

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesia, V1

51 Days

The cost of the thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. - Henry Thoreau

*

Here we go. The alert went out on Saturday 27 October before Halloween when Sit Down, a native with a degree in Business Management from Tupperware College, living at home and working as admin guy at the TEOL school in Trabzon, tried to reach Lucky in Giresun - cherry in Latin - 2.5 hours away.

Sit Down needed his documents to apply for a residency permit.

The all-knowing, all seeing, all powerful and all believing Turkish government of bored drones, wanting to force everyone in the food chain to be accountable so they could maintain Control had told TEOL:

You, Profit Before People, running an educational business intent on brainwashing and dumbing down children, young adults, old adults and diseased heart-mind dead humans in quest of an English certificate from your institution have ... according to the grand and glorious proclamation from our dead fearless and forever glorified leader Ata Boy, ten calendar days - yes only ten - act now before it’s too late - to file the required paperwork requesting work permits for your native speakers born and raised outside our glorious land of sea, sky and succulent tomatoes, speaking with their clear pronunciation, these specific barbarians, after filing for their residency permits.

Failure to do so, said Authority, Means:

1) they cannot be employed by the state of Confusion & Sorrow & High Anxiety

2) they cannot order Allah cart in Kofte diners featuring grilled shit burgers slathered with yogurt

3) they will be decapitated at dawn tomorrow by a warrior hero riding a white stallion waving a diamond mind blade

Failure to comply with our Ten-Day Decree means you will need to start the complete bureaucratic sham process all over again. You will lose face. You will suffer personal & national humiliation & our brutal revenge.

You will become a hunted dog and massacred like 1.5 million Armenians. We do not acknowledge this genocide in 1914. We erased the Armenians. We deny their existence.

Prove it.

Denial kills you.

Anger is expensive.

Failure to comply and lie with intentional cunning means you will have to haul more word shit and process tedious official documents. You will spend years seeking a stamp from a performing seal of approval.

You will raise your greasy baksheesh palms to heaven imploring Ali Baba the leader of forty thieves for redemption and solace.

Tell me you love me. Desire, love and passion create suffering. Suffering is an illusion.

WE, Authority do our best to make the paperwork process cumbersome, illogical, frustrating, idiotic, mind numbing, depressing, heavy deep & real shit for brains.

We love paper. It’s why, as you've seen in Bay (male) or Bayan (female) toilets the absence of paper products. We use holy water imported from the Vatican via Syria to blast orifices. Water is sweeter than pleasure principles smothered with honey.

Everything here needs an official government issued signed stamped document permit for: breathing, laughing, dreaming, dancing, drawing, writing and meditating.

No paper no chance. Please note this text message to Lucky from Sit Down.

51 Days In Turkey